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VANCOUVER — Steve de Jong became the chief executive officer of Integra Gold, a Quebec-focused junior exploration company, in July 2012.

He was 28.

De Jong is a tall man — he’s 6 foot 6 — and the new job was a tall order.

He was immediately competing for scarce capital and investors against veteran mining executives, some of whom had run companies for longer than he’d been alive.

Gold was trading at about US$1,600 an ounce, having fallen from highs of $1,900 the previous fall, and the sector was entering a three-year drought that would see financings dry up and investors flee.

An ounce of gold now sells for about US$1,200 and much of the junior mining sector is on care and maintenance.

“When the money disappears in the industry, it’s the exploration that gets turned off first, then the development,” de Jong said in a recent interview at the company’s Vancouver office. “The pipeline of projects that everyone relies on has sort of faded away. There are no real exploration discoveries being made right now, because there are so few exploration dollars actually being spent.”

Integra has weathered the storm better than most. The company is cashed up, having just raised $13 million for drilling as well as underground and surface work at its high-grade Lamaque underground gold project in Quebec.

With eight drills turning, the company has already drilled 45,000 metres this year — one of the most active exploration programs in North America. All that drilling should bump up the number of ounces in the next resource estimate, as well as extend the mine life.

Integra also became a development story last year with the acquisition of Sigma-Lamaque, a nearby mine property that includes a shuttered mill.

De Jong’s father John was born in the Netherlands, a country that pioneered the modern stock market when the Dutch East India Company issued shares to investors in the early 1600s. And it was through investing that the elder de Jong, a retired Mountie, first became familiar with the Canadian mining sector.

He helped restructure Integra Gold from its previous iteration and remains a company director; Steve joined the board in early 2011 after completing a commerce degree at Royal Roads University and running a small iron ore exploration company.

De Jong’s start in the junior mining sector — in January 2008 — coincided with the tail end of the supercycle and the advent of the financial crisis, so he’s already familiar with mining’s cyclical nature.

“In a lot of ways, the recession is a lot easier to swallow than a three-year downturn,” said de Jong. “It’s an event and it goes for six or 12 months but a lot of companies don’t run out of capital during that time. As resource exploration companies, we’re all non-cash-flowing companies.”

Ask him about mentors in the industry, and the first name that comes up is George Salamis, Integra’s chairman, who early in his career worked at the Sigma project when it was owned by Placer Dome. Salamis is one of several Integra execs with experience both in Quebec and at Sigma-Lamaque.

In some ways, de Jong says, age has been an ally as he navigates his way through a landscape marked by low commodity prices and junior mining wreckage.

“I don’t think people feel as threatened by a 31-year-old CEO, so I’ve had a lot of very good conversations … which has been extremely helpful for me,” de Jong said. “When you sit down and go for lunch with a gold company CEO who’s been doing it for 20 years, there’s a lot of value you can get from that.”

De Jong is also positioned well in an aging industry with a workforce even older than the Canadian average, according to Statistics Canada.

As for Integra, having the right postal code helps — its project borders on the town of Val d’Or (literally “valley of gold”) in the Abitibi greenstone belt, the second most prolific gold district in the world.

The “leapfrog move” of purchasing the Sigma-Lamaque property and mill could dramatically reduce the cost of both building an underground mine and producing the gold, according to de Jong. The deal also came with several mining permits, some of which were unanticipated.

“We think this project in production is worth a lot more than it is now,” he said.

However, the fire-sale purchase — Integra bought the mill for a fraction of its assessed value — is not without risks. The operation had bankrupted the two previous owners, one of which had run out of money transitioning from underground to open-pit mining.

But most of the mill is in good shape, de Jong said, and Integra plans to feed it with ore from two different high-grade underground gold zones that weren't part of the previous owner's holdings.

“We didn’t buy this project to be bankruptcy No. 3. We bought it for the mill.”

There is strong local support for the project, de Jong said.

“We hosted a town-hall meeting that 300 people came out to, and it was just an outpouring of support for what we’re doing,” he said. “It’s a mining district and there are more mines shutting down than opening up.”

De Jong also aims to give long-suffering junior mining shareholders something to cheer about. It’s worked so far — Integra’s stock is up about 46 per cent year-to-date. Since de Jong took the helm, Integra shares have outpaced the price of gold, the benchmark S&P/TSX Venture composite index and the Dow Jones junior gold index.

While travelling to the mine site or on investor visits, the young chief executive has Georgia on his mind these days. That’s the name of de Jong’s seven-month-old daughter, he and wife Alyson’s first child.

“It kind of puts things into perspective,” he said. “It’s that much more of a sense of urgency to get home.”

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Young CEO drives Quebec gold project forward

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